


Blossom

by novembersmith



Category: Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Genre: F/F, Pining, Polyamory implied, Pre-Slash, sexual awakenings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 20:46:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9020680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novembersmith/pseuds/novembersmith
Summary: Lili thought she'd understood everything there was to know about her feelings for Yona, but there's yet another layer to unfurl.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Letterblade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/gifts).



> Letterblade, WHY WERE ALL YOUR PROMPTS SO GREAT, I wish I could have written for every one! I hope you enjoy my take on these girls. Thanks so much for sharing a fandom with me, and have a merry Yuletide!

The first time Lili really even considers it in a conscious way, instead of just flailing around instinctively in a mess of emotions, is when she walks in on Ayura and Tetora. They’re kissing, or rather, Tetora is topless, and Ayura is tenderly kissing the knotted scar on her belly. Tetora’s breasts are just barely exposed by the fall of her hair, peeking out pinkly, and for a moment they’re all Lili sees. They're so much rounder and fuller than her own, like ivory chalices made for cupping.

“Don’t, it’s ugly,” Tetora is murmuring, but her hand is in Ayura’s hair, and her face, already always so tender, is almost painful to look at now as she stares down at her fellow guard. Ayura doesn’t stop pressing kisses to her scarred skin.

“Nothing about you is ugly,” she says, and her normally sharp voice is soft, almost sweet.

“Ah,” Tetora sighs, and that’s about when Lili realizes Ayura’s hand is in her skirts, and—and—

She’s pretty sure they hear her crashing away, because they are impossibly clever and have better hearing almost than those dragons. But they don’t come after her, thank all the lords and ladies and gods of every realm. She’s not sure what her heart is doing, but it takes dunking her head into one of the ornamental fish ponds, chill in the early morning air, for her to stop feeling impossibly hot, too large for her skin. It's an itchy feeling, almost, like her skin might at any minute split, snake-like, and a new self step out.

It’s not an unfamiliar sensation, though, and she buries her face in her hands and thinks: Yona, Yona, Yona. So that’s what I want. One of the many things she wants – she wants too much, she knows, she’s always been too hungry to keep fed, and her cousins still tease her about what a chubby, demanding baby she’d been. She still feels that way, but not for food. For action, for meaning, for—something. To be a person Yona could lean on, to be someone Yona relies on.

It’s different than her feelings for Lord Geun-tae, who she mostly thinks about in nebulously romantic thoughts, picturing sweeping gestures of being slung over horseback, of vague kisses composed of stubble and sweat and muscle. She wants to coo marvelingly over his prowess at battle, to be offered his token. It’s—and she’s never let herself think this before—not something real, that she’s ever expected to get. Her feelings are a puddle, next to the ocean of history and emotion between Yona and her dragons, let alone Yona and Soo-won, Yona and Hak.

 _Yona_. With Yona Lili wants something deeper than gestures alone, though she wants them, too. She wants to pick Yona up and carry her over a threshold, she wants them to go to battle together, to press side to side. Ayura had been making wet sounds when she kissed Tetora, when she worked her fingers unseen against her, beneath her skirt, and Lili hadn’t _known_ to want that, but suddenly she does, in an embarrassingly hot rush that has her squirming, crossing her legs.

She wants it so much it seems like she’s choking on it, almost – the thought of pressing kisses to Yona’s belly, to the scars on her back – it’s too much. Suddenly she’s weeping.

“Lady Lili,” Tetora says behind her, all lilting concern, and then catches her automatically, effortlessly, when Lili flings herself into her arms.

“Yona has—has all those beautiful men,” she sobs into Tetora’s shoulder. “And Hak, and his majesty, and—I’m just _me!_ What can I do?”

“Ah,” Ayura says from behind Tetora, cool and understanding. When Lili peeks out from Tetora’s hair, she looks flustered, just the slightest bit pink, which is enough to jolt Lili out of her crying jag due to sheer surprise at the rarity of the sight. “You must stop underselling yourself, Lady Lili. There is no 'just' anything about you.”

“Ah, darling,” Tetora says, and strokes Lili’s hair, and lifts her chin. “Yona is very lovable, isn’t she? One almost can’t help but adore her.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Lili despairs. “I just, I want—what do I _do_?”

“Kiss her?” Ayura suggests, and Lili gapes, then gapes somehow even wider when Tetora nods.

“You may as well – she won’t mind, I think, even if she doesn’t lean towards women in our way. But I wouldn’t worry so much about the men. You matter as much to her, in your own way. A person like that never has only one love – they’ve got too much to give.”

This, Lili puzzles out as she scrubs her face, seems like it should be just a platitude, but it’s not, it’s true. Yona’s relationship to Hak does not diminish in any way that Lili can tell her sweet feelings for Shin-ah, or her fierce devotion in Zeno, her bemused adoration of Jae-ha, her teasing delight in Kija. And even if her history, her present and her future with Soo-won still looms over her, shadowing all she does, it doesn’t change or endanger the depth of her feelings for any of the others in the slightest.

Eventually, she gathers her dignity back around her. She shakes Tetora's arms loose, slumping to the lawn at her feet instead and sighing gustily. The tranquility of the lotus pond, normally a favorite spot, now seems almost to mock her inner turmoil. The calm surface hid mud and bottom-feeders; the flowers drifted on top as though unaware. The world was so much more complex than it seemed when she was a child, and she has no idea how Yona begins to navigate it, let alone how she navigates her emotions, the tangle of relationships she's in.

She thinks of Yona flinging herself into Lili’s arms at the fortress, when their chests so close their hearts seemed to beat against each other, both of them smelling of blood and dust and sour with fear-sweat. Yona had been so beautiful, so magnificent, that it transcended her tatters, made them regal and beautiful too. She thinks of Yona’s anguished face when Zeno was hurt, and the steely cold of her first look at Soo-Won, and of the way she’d giggled with Lili in bed in their pajamas over Hak and Geun-tae. So many facets to one single, fragile person. All of that is part of Yona, isn't it?

“I will,” she decides firm, and raises her face to the sky. “I will, next time I see her, I’ll kiss her. And then… and then we’ll see, I guess.” Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She is not the type to sit and wait when something matters, after all.

She turns to the pair of guards, who are watching her now with fond amusement, with something like pride, she guesses, in their eyes.

“What’s the best way to kiss someone? To—to, well,” she demands, lacking words and wanting _more_ , but Ayura slips a hand over Tetora’s mouth before she can say anything else.

“Some things, it is not our place to share, and my lady will have to find out for herself.”

Lili considers this, and finds that, as in so many other things, her guards are right. She is perfectly capable of figuring this out on her own, and fully intends to. For now, though, she gives her guards leave to return to their privacy – chin high, refusing to admit her own blush on the matter – and lays back to stare again at the drifting pink petals, floating on the reflection of the sky. They grow out of the mud and the muck, it's true, but they push up into the light, and open unstained as the sun rises, unfurling like the dawn.

The world is rearranged, again, inside her - a revolution in thought that is softer yet no less fierce than the one that led her proudly to the hangman’s noose. She rubs at her throat, staring out across the gleaming, glowing lake, and considers petals, and promise, and hands entwined, of long legs beneath skirts – she has felt so grown up, lately, but still.

There’s always more to think about. Eventually she will go inside, to her private rooms, and make her own explorations, but for now she watches the sun rise, and recognizes the glow in her chest for what it is at last.


End file.
